Iconic brand De Vere to sell off all its premier golf clubs

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De Vere has put all the golfing resorts it owns in the UK up for sale, according to newspaper reports.

The De Vere golf course in Loch Lomond

The six golf clubs affected are all premier venues: Cameron House in Loch Lomond, Mottram Hall in Cheshire, Slaley Hall in Northumberland, Dunston Hall near Ipswich, Belton Woods in Lincolnshire and Oulton Hall near Leeds.

Cameron House alone is expected to sell for about £65 million according to Herald Scotland – nearly double the amount the Turnberry golf resort, also in Scotland, sold for just last month, in what was then one of the biggest transactions in British golfing history.

The six clubs together are expected to fetch about £160 million.

The Belfry, which is managed by De Vere and in 2005 was sold by it for £186 million, is not up for sale as it is now owned by US private equity firm KSL Capital Partners, which, according to the Sunday Times, will, along with a ‘clutch of private equity firms’, bid for the six clubs.

De Vere, which went into the hands of Lloyds Banking Group during the financial crisis in a £1.7 billion debt-for-equity deal of which Lloyds has written off £650 million, sold its conference division in March for £231 million and has been selling off its non-golf hotels for several months. It sold the Grand in Brighton for £50 million earlier this month for instance.

De Vere Slaley Hall (Priestman Course)

Lloyds brought in Andrew Coppel, the former Queens Moat Houses chief executive, as De Vere’s CEO, and he said last year: “It was agreed with Lloyds in December 2011, soon after I joined De Vere, that we would work toward crystallising the value of the business over a three to four-year period.”